The Scarlet Oak

Thursday, January 5, 2017

I am about 6 feet 2
inches tall. I have never thought of myself as particularly tall.
When I was in elementary school--one time in life when relative size
seemed to matter, where the phrase “size places” had meaning—I
was of middling height. I hit my growth spurt in high school, along
with everyone else, so though I may have grown faster than some of
my peers, I did not notice. The management guru, Morris
Massey, posits that our core values are laid down by the time we
are seven years old. It may well be that I formed the impression that
I was of medium height early on, and nothing in the subsequent
periods (Modeling [ages 8-13] and Socialization [ages 13-21])
disturbed that impression. That is itself a disturbing discovery.
What other operating assumptions from when I was 6 years old have
survived unquestioned for six decades?

A logical first step
would be to determine by some objective standard whether I am tall.
According
to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the mean
height of a male over 20 years old in the United States is about 5
ft. 9 in. At 6 ft. 2in. I am in about the 94th percentile
of men. So when I am in a crowd of a hundred random men in the US,
there are likely to be no more than 6 men taller than I am. It also
means that in a crowd, I know where I am because I can see all around
me. My spouse is 5 ft. 2 ½ in. tall; she is in about the 35th
percentile for U.S. women over 20 years old. The 5th
percentile for men begins at about 5 ft. 4 in. That means that when
she is in a crowd, 65% of the women and over 95% of the men are
taller than she is, and many are tall enough to obscure her vision
completely. She does not like being in crowds. How stupid do you need
to be to to not realize the fundamental difference in our experiences
of crowds? I have realized it from time to time, but it is not a
consistent part, a necessary part of being with my spouse in a crowd.

No,
I never forget that I am taller than she is, but wrapped in the
misconception that I am not that tall, I figure everyone is seeing
about the same thing I am; therefore, I don’t understand that what
I am seeing has anything to do with my height. Do you see how this
works? Because I do not see myself as tall, I have been unaware of
what should be clear evidence that I am tall. I must believe I am
tall before I can understand that what I see in a crowd is evidence
that I am tall.

Since the 2016
presidential election, like many crestfallen progressives, I have
been thinking about how people can ignore facts and evidence and
logical reasoning. Reflecting on my height problem has made me more
sympathetic to someone who might ignore evidence when deciding how to
vote. Breaking the habit of thinking of myself as of average height
did not happen because I got more information; it happened because I
looked at specific situation from the point of view of someone I
cared about and did it enough times and with increasing attention so
that I understood the situation differently.

But saying that
looking at a situation or idea or problem from another point of view
may be crucial in understanding a situation is not saying that truth
is relative. Evidence supported by facts must the bedrock of our
understanding of the world. Taking into account another perspective
does not mean that facts are irrelevant to arriving at the best
understanding of a situation, but ignoring another point of view may
make facts invisible. In my case empathy preceded evidence. And even
with the empathy and the evidence, it still takes a conscious effort
to think of myself as tall.

So my sense of
superiority in thinking that I voted based
on logic and evidence, and those who voted differently did
not, assumes that my decision is rooted in self-evident facts. But
perhaps those facts were not just unpersuasive to some people, they
were invisible, and the evidence they based their decisions on was
invisible to me. Understanding the difference this way does not
change what I think of the decisions, but it does mean I can be less
puzzled about why people made the decisions they did in the face of
evidence compelling to me but invisible to them. Their decisions no
longer seem blatantly illogical since they do not ignore facts; they
don’t see them.

My height problem
suggests that over the next months, as the changes resulting from the
2016 election play themselves out, if people experience some changes
directly or indirectly through what happens to those they care about,
their views of the situation may change, and facts may begin to
appear, like the letters in Wheel of Fortune, until the
message pops into place for them. I will be guessing and spinning the
wheel too, and we will see who among us is most surprised by the
results.

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Like most white
males with college degrees, I am deeply disturbed by Trump’s
election. All the specific negative consequences (consequences I do
not wish to list because reminding myself of them only increases my
sense of despondency) contribute to that ache in my stomach, but a
disorienting worm in that clot of concern is helplessness. I feel
that way because my tool for dealing with things like the Trump
victory—logical analysis—has been undermined by that victory.
Logical arguments based on fact were not just insufficient; for many
Americans, they were not even relevant. Appealing to emotions—telling
people you will address their concerns, proving to them that you
understand those concerns by stoking their fear and prejudice and
anger while making vague references to solutions—is the kind of
argument that won the day. Even Nate Silver’s painstaking logical
analysis of the polling data was wrong and unhelpful.

Trump told people
things were terrible when they were not terrible, but it is pointless
to kick that dead horse because citing facts has been proven
ineffective (an assertion based on fact) since people who make
decisions based on wishful thinking are immune to logical argument.
Even if the wishful thinking were less negatively motivated, it
would still be a problem; that for so many, it is negative, makes the
need for a solution more urgent. If facts and logic don’t matter,
what are the tools we are going to use to fix this? How can I move
beyond being helpless.

I am not thrilled
with the conclusion I have come to. If hate and fear got us here,
maybe compassion is the only way back to where we can start to use
logic again. That seems like such a limp response, since my hurt and
anger wish for a terrible swift sword. I am not good at compassion,
but as I try out courses of action in my head, I keep getting to the
last corner and turn to see Compassion sitting there smiling at me,
not with a bright, cheerful, sunny smile, but a calm and slightly
bemused smile that shows awareness of my internal conflict, a smile
full of, well, compassion.

Looking for
something else, I happened on a passage in Thomas Carlyle’s 19th
Century Sartor Resartus, which suggested a way for me to start
thinking about my approach to compassion:

‘In vain thou deniest it,’ says the Professor; ‘thou art my
Brother. Thy very Hatred, thy very Envy, those foolish Lies thou
tellest of me in thy splenetic humor: what is all this but an
inverted Sympathy? Were I a Steam-engine, wouldst thou take the
trouble to tell lies of me? Not thou! I should grind all unheeded,
whether badly or well.’

Those who disagree
with us, especially if they are particularly forceful about it, care
about what we think of them. This sensitivity to the opinions of
others is a clear Trump trait. Those who supported Trump are likely
to respond well to some respect, and looking for some common ground
to build that respect is a laudable goal.

Of course this might
be easy for me to say because I live in Massachusetts, where Trump
supporters are a clear minority. On the other hand, the compassion
may be even more appreciated.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

In
the previous entry, “In
a Glass Dome,” we considered the problem of accepting the
simpler scientific explanation for something when that acceptance
requires a change in world view. Perhaps
global warming as
a result of human activity
is such
an
explanation. It
may not seem as momentous as accepting that the earth moves around
the sun, but it is akin to it.

Those who believe that the natural world was created for us by a benevolent God (well, once we disobeyed, he became a bit less benevolent, but it was still our world) those believers, may have a hard time accepting that we can screw the place up and disrupt the divine order of things. For such believers, making that claim overestimates our power; besides, because divine intervention to destroy or restore the world is always possible, thinking that we can control what happens is an act of pride. However, if we see ourselves as just part of the natural world, not its overlord but the cleverest of its animals, we realize that we can die out, perhaps the victims of our own cleverness because nothing guarantees that our species will survive to the end of the world with trumpets and angels and all. So in order to accept global warming as a serious problem, we need first to accept that we are not the special creatures of an all powerful being who will do what is best for us.

The
opposite of the humility-based
argument is the hubris-based
argument, expressed by those
confident that humans’ godlike ingenuity can
increase the capacity of the
world regardless of what happens.
They
point to how the Green
Revolution, resulting from an array of agricultural innovations
that replaced traditional farming methods, radically increased the
world-wide crop yield. The increase in food after
World War II was almost
miraculous, and some places
where starvation was endemic were
eventually able
to produce surpluses. Those
who feel that the potential for innovation is unlimited are not
intimidated by the warming of the earth.

Of course the Catch-22 of
that position is that since we have not been innovative
enough to to reduce the rate
at which the earth is warming as a result of our other innovations,
why do we think we can solve the problems resulting from global warming when we could
not deal with its causes? Even
the Green Revolution, with its heavy reliance on chemicals, fossil
fuel, mono-culture, and massive irrigation, is itself becoming a
problem as the cheap food it has been able to yield has wiped out more resilient, low-impact, local agricultural practices. Now the
climate disruptions created by global warming--the shifts in seasonal
patterns, droughts
and floods, and violent weather events—are
putting stress on industrial agricultural practices that
helped produce the warming. It is a
gamble to go on in an
unsustainable manner depending
on some unspecified, future breakthrough to save us, to think of the
earth as an infinitely open system.

NASA

In 1966, the economist Kenneth
Boulding argued we should treat earth as a closed system and
understand that we need to be as careful of what we are doing as we
would be on a spaceship. Buckminister Fuller warned in Operating
Manual for Spaceship
Earth (1968) that fossil fuel is a finite resource developed
over millions of years, a resource we should treat as temporary,
something we should use to develop renewable sources of energy.
NASA’s Big Blue Marble composite photograph taken by Apollo 17 in
1975 shows the globe of earth as a whole surrounded by the blackness
of space. Though we can travel over the continuous surface of the
earth and never reach an edge, this image shows that sharp border
between the earth and the blackness surrounding it: our earth is a
small finite spot in a huge hostile universe.

In 1988 when James
Hanson of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies testified before
the US Congress about global warming, some Americans began to take
notice. People of my generation grew up with the fear of a nuclear
apocalypse and were used to the idea that people could make the earth
unlivable. However, the Mutually Assured Destruction approach to
world peace (appropriate acronym, MAD) involved devices whose sole
purpose was to destroy, so all we needed to do was not turn them on.
But global warming is different because it is a byproduct of living
well, the dark side of progress. In order to stop the destruction we
must do more than not turn things on; we must turn things off, and to
do that we must change the way we live at a fundamental level.

Just
as Galileo’s observations and analysis cemented Copernicus’s
heliocentric explanation in place, the
subsequent
work of the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change has
forced us to accept that our actions are affecting the earth’s
viability for humans. Global
warming
reminds us that in deciding
what to do, we
must not ask only “Can we
do it?” but we must also
ask “Should
we do it?” The first is a
scientific question; the second uses scientifically derived
information, but it is an ethical question.
We must rediscover that the universe
does not revolve around us humans, that the earth was not made for
us, but that we have evolved and thrived in the earth’s
environment, and if that environment changes too much, our species
will
die out.

Once
again accepting scientific results disrupts comforting
religious and
humanistic world views. To
extend the survival of our
species, we must accept the
possibility of its death.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

In this diagram of Ptolemy’s universe (developed ca. 150), planets revolve in epicycles around invisible points revolving around a stable earth. This explanation squared with the ancient belief that our earth was the center of the universe.

Based on Nicolaus Copernicus' De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Wikipedia

Move the sun to the center
as Copernicus did in 1543, and the need for epicycles disappears.
Natural philosophers had found Ptolemy’s explanation satisfactory
for about 1200 years and resisted Copernicus’s. Beginning in 1609,
however, Galileo began making observations with telescopes, producing
a series of phenomena that made the geocentric model of the universe
harder and harder to defend. However,
even Copernicus, for
whom the starry dome of the night sky overhead became the “immobile
sphere of fixed stars,”
did not get it all right.

The
accuracy of the sun-centered explanation of the motion of the planets
seems obvious to us now, since it is a so much simpler explanation.
We often refer to Occam’s razor to explain the scientific
preference for the simplest explanation, but William of Occam
(1287-1347) was not the first one to formulate this idea; ironically,
a much earlier statement of it, “We consider it a good principle to
explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible,” was
made by Ptolemy. However, another formulation of Occam’s razor is
more precise in its application of simplicity: “Among competing
hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected”
(Wikipedia).

The
Ptolemaic model required many assumptions, some of which reached far
beyond astronomy and were entangled
with religious belief so that in the 16th Century, disassembling the world view based on the geocentric universe was hardly a simple act because the heliocentric view of the planets required a whole new view of the world.Religion functioned then as science does now: a universally accepted
schema for explaining the world. For us, science predicts the future,
tells us what to eat, heals us, speaks the obscure language of
mathematics, explicates the stars and planets to us, and understands
the mysteries of the invisible quanta, just
as medieval Christianity did.
If some discovery falsified
crucial assumptions of
the scientific process—the discovery that, for example, the earth
is actually a computer simulation and the code has just been changed
so that some conclusions already proven are no longer true—if such a
proposition were itself proven, would
we all embrace it immediately because it was
a simple explanation for why some outcomes defied science? For the 16th Century, heliocentrism was not a simple solution.

Galileo’s
proofs of the Copernican universe met with serious push-back, and
he died while still in official disgrace,
but later, when he was reburied in a place of greater honor, the middle
finger of his right hand was removed from his body. Currently
on
display in a glass dome,
it is suitably
mounted in a vertical position, perhaps as a warning to those of us
too invested in our assumptions to see the simple truth of our
situation.

Monday, October 3, 2016

I
am writing this during allergy season, which many people associate
with the appearance of goldenrod. However, goldenrod is not a problem
for allergy suffers, because its flashy flowers mean it depends on
attracting insects to spread its heavy pollen. If you are searching
for a culprit, look among those plants who do not care whether anyone
notices them, those with, say, green flowers, like ragweed, which
blooms at the same time as goldenrod. Its nondescript flowers
sticking straight up in the air depend on wind pollination, so they
fill the air with their pollen that we then breathe in. How we
understand the world influences how we see it.

Monarch Butterfly on Golden Rod

I
have thought that perhaps I can help people find that richer
relationship with the natural world through the power of metaphor,
which charges the world with the electricity of imagination and
enables us to see and feel the excitement inherent in the world that
surrounds and includes us. Just look at the names of those two late
summer plants: “golden rod” for the tall beautiful plant that
entices insects to itself as part of its sexual reproduction and “rag
weed” for the unattractive, low down plant that promiscuously
spreads its pollen to unwelcome passages. The contrast in their
natures is captured in the imagery of the popular name—riches and
rags.

I
call what I want to do “nature writing” rather than
“environmental writing”, because environmental writing seems more
journalistic and news/event driven and shifts focus as the news of
the day shifts focus. Nature writing, in my lexicon, strives to be
reflective and universal; I want my writing to be powered by our
engagement with the nature where “lives the dearest freshness deep
down things.” However, I am beginning to think that I can no longer
write about nature without some environmental undertones or
overtones. To deal with a real place is to deal with its ecology, and
as McKibbon
pointed out in 1989 (and is even more obvious today) there is no
ecology that is unaffected by human decision making.

But
even my dependence on explicit metaphor may be suspect. As George
Lackoff and Mark Johnson pointed out in Metaphors
We Live By,first published
in 1987, even our
everyday language is shot through with metaphor, and we useinterconnected networks of
metaphor to define and clarify our expression. For example,
an idea is like a plant: it grows and spreads and can be nurtured and
can die. Metaphors drawn from concrete experience of nature weave
their way into our thinking, and those ideas then echo in our
descriptions of nature, so that the ancient forest becomes majestic
and inspiring like a grand idea. That relationship suggests that
language is a good way into nature because language and nature
interact in our experience, just as our abandoned fields of disturbed
earth create an environment for ragweed, and ragweed creates an
environment for us. And now I will go blow my nose.

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

We
were visiting the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I bent over a display case in
the Yellow Room, one of whose themes is music, to look at a letter,
which I think was written by Brahms, but as I did so I noticed a
small card in the corner of the case explaining that its contents
were copies, since the originals would be damaged by the light. I was
surprised at how quickly I lost interest in the case once I knew
that.

The
Gardner Museum is a wonderfully bizarre place, designed by Isabella
Stewart Gardner herself to house the particular art collection that
she owned. She envisioned the museum itself as a work of art, so she
specified where and how all the art was to be displayed. The museum
was completed in 1903 and her decorating tastes are Victorian, and by
today’s standards, she is into clutter. Of course, the museum
professionals have built a modern wing where they can do it “right,”
but the main part of the museum embodies the vision of a particular
person shaped by a sensibility different from today’s. An exhibit
while we were there featured some masterworks from the collection. A
section of the museum was closed and they had placed (as it says in the
exhibit description) “[a] select group of paintings and
drawings in our contemporary exhibition space, [to be] seen up close
and lit to best advantage.” We could indeed see the paintings, hung
at gallery height with space between them, but the effect seemed
generic compared to Isabella Gardner’s more idiosyncratic
arrangements.That
same disconnect from the past may also be at work in my response to
the letters in the Yellow Room. The difference between the real thing
and an accurate reproduction of the thing makes me recall Walter
Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” written in 1936, and prompted by the rise of
photography, sound recording, and film. The ability to reproduce a
work of art raises the question of the role of the original. The
problem has only intensified since 1936 with the creation of
digitization, since the colors of a painting on a high definition
screen glow from the inside and allow the examination at
extraordinary detail.This reproduction of Rembrant’s The Night
Watch and this detail of
the left
eye of the central figure
[though such detail is possible anywhere on the painting] are from
the Google
Art Project.

Benjamin talks about the real thing having an aura, and surely that is part of
it. An original is something Rembrandt touched and being in the
presence of the actual object gives me, at least, a slight tingle
that resonates from the physical connection with an object created
over 300 years ago.

Night Watch Gallery --Eric Smits

The
actual object today is in the Rijksmuseumin
Amsterdam,
so the setting of the original is quite different from the one I see
it in, a computer screen in a small second-story room in a house in
northern Massachusetts. The
context in which we see something has an impact on how we perceive
it, even though that context is generally extraneous to the work of
art. As my Gardner Museum
experience reminded me, displaying art is itself art. Ultimately,
however, we cannot look at a work of art in its original context
because contexts have quick expiration dates; any film with the world
Trade Center in the New York skyline has been changed forever. The
ability of a reproduction to take the work of art out of context
seems less damning than what reproducing implies about the object
itself. To value the high quality reproduction, we must assume that
the essential aspects of the work of art are being reproduced in the
reproduction. We capture the color, the structure, the tones and
shades, even the cracks in the texture. But each age has its own
values, its own sense of what is important and what is unimportant,
and we will leave out what we think is unimportant, and something is
lost in the transmission across time. Only some fresh eye looking at
the original will see it and point it out, and our eyes will be
reopened to something we have become blind to, even when we look
directly into its huge, enlarged eye.

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Rainwater falls randomly from the sky into a tree where the rain becomes
organized into drip patterns defined by the shape of the leaves, branches, and
bark of the tree until, dripping into the soil, the water becomes randomly
organized once again. Wendell Berry, in a letter to Wes Jackson (reprinted in Home
Economics, 3-5), critiques this description from a scientific book on
soil by arguing that randomness is not “a verifiable condition,” but is “a
limit of perception.” He asserts that “random” is a misleading word that
assumes there is no possible pattern in what is observed; the more proper term
is “mystery.” “Random” assumes that there is not possible pattern; “mystery”
assumes we just can’t see it.

While Berry emphasizes practicality, he associates mystery
with religion and there is danger in letting mystery come trailing that
umbilical cord. The earliest uses are theological and often were associated
with secret religious rites. The most common and comprehensive theological use
of “mystery” today is probably based on this Oxford English Dictionary definition: “A religious truth known or
understood only by divine revelation; esp. a doctrine of faith
involving difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving.” Defined
this way, “mystery” becomes as much of a dead end as “random,” shutting down
further exploration with certainty. If we posit a god capable of creating
unsolvable mysteries, in a sense the mysteries disappear into God, who embodies
the solutions. Why do we die? God does not die. Why are there evil people? God
is perfect and entirely good. Why do bad things happen to good people and good
things happen to bad people? It will all work out because God is perfectly just.
God resolves all mysteries, but if we take God out of the picture, what remains
are the mysteries for which there are no facile answers.

The most expansive non-theological use of the term “mystery”
is related to the OED definition, “A
hidden or secret thing; something inexplicable or beyond human comprehension; a
person or thing evoking awe or wonder but not well known or understood; an
enigma.” Despite the use of the word “inexplicable” in the definition, a Google
search on “solve a mystery” or “solve the mystery” yields 8.6 M hits, so that
for many of us a mystery is something to be solved; it is open-ended, and in
that sense calling something a mystery in the non-theological sense is a
beginning.

The popular genre of the murder mystery turns on the axis of
logical analysis. A satisfying ending generally involves explaining motivations
and events with proof that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, though
such stories also allow for the operation of “justice” outside the law. Such an
extra-legal conclusion would be unsatisfying, would become a crime in need of
solution.

I have argued
earlier that not all conflicting dualities can be resolved and that perhaps
our best understanding is to accept both and see the world in 3-D. Maybe the
better way to describe our response should be to say we can’t ignore dualities.
They suggest enigmas, mysteries, in need of deeper exploration, though I
suspect that we will discover deeper mysteries that allow us to understand our
state more clearly; it will likely be mysteries all the way down.

Science should be done surrounded by mystery. Religion and science could both use more respect for mystery. Perhaps if religions treated
God as more mysterious and thought twice before claiming to know what God wants
and to speak in God’s behalf, the world might be a more peaceful place.